


A World of Colour

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, attempted suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 05:37:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3163226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’d all fallen so far. From happy children, to criminals, to condemned souls, earth bound survivors, warriors, and now… Whatever they are now. Octavia’s not sure what happened, but they lived. Through everyone and everything trying to kill them, they’d somehow had the great misfortune of being left to remember the fallen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A World of Colour

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case you missed the tags, this deals a bit with depression and attempted suicide (Jumping off a cliff), so if that might be triggering for you, give this one a pass. Also, assume that they landed in the foothills of the Rockies (where it's actually filmed) as far as geography goes

They’d all fallen so far. From happy children, to criminals, to condemned souls, earth bound survivors, warriors, and now… Whatever they are now. Octavia’s not sure what happened, but they lived. Through everyone and everything trying to kill them, they’d somehow had the great misfortune of being left to remember the fallen.

Twenty of them remain. Their village is full of grim children, old before their time, but only twenty of them came from the Ark. They’d picked up others along the way, the kids that grounders didn’t want. Mutants, cowards, anyone cast out for a reason they couldn’t help. Hell, most of their clan came from a tribe where homosexuality was grounds for execution. Recruiting those ones had been sadly easy.

So they’d ended up in the mountains. Not the lush, lively mountains that the delinquents had started in. No, their journey had taken them East, climbing higher to escape all those who wished to kill them, and even higher to escape the ones who were good at it. The mountains they now call home are ice covered death traps, already having claimed three lives in the year it took them to establish themselves.

Octavia’s not sure how she feels about the mountains, or their village, or the people she’s supposed to see as family. She used to be so sure in her emotions, fleeting and changing as they were. And then Atom had died, and with him a little bit of her romance. With Finn had died her concept of heroism. Lincoln took her love to the grave. Sixty members of her family had taken her joy.

So Octavia retreats into logic and applying herself to her work. The mountains are good for defending. Her guards may not have the easiest patrol routes, but they see everything. No one can possibly sneak up on them. She protects the people because that is what she must do. She wakes with the first cold rays of sunlight and begins her patrols, breaking only for a noontime meal, and falls asleep just before the sun sets. She can’t bear the nights anymore.

Many of the people see her as a hero. She’d saved many of them from their tormentors, cussing out village elders in their own language and holding her blade against any who would oppose them. Those had been the days when pain had lit a fire within her, when loss was still sharp enough to cause her to bleed molten rage. She had been a vengeful angel as they fought their way to safety, and that is the image many of the villagers will hold until they die. 

But that was before everything had gone grey. The endless snow, crumbling rocks, and shabby huts had let everything fade from importance to her. She was no hero, no samurai as they once jokingly called her. It hurt too much to trade war stories with Miller and Harper, so she had withdrawn from the twenty. She only saw Bellamy for her reports, and Clarke when she injured herself. Octavia learned how to sew up minor wounds quickly.

The pain had dulled around the edges, but it had grown. It was an insidious thing, whispering dark thoughts to her, never quite insistent enough for her to fight against. If she’d had something to fight, this would all be so much easier. But they were safe now, her men were too good to let anyone slip through their guard, and Octavia can feel herself fading more and more into the grey with each passing day.

And so it is, one morning. She wakes up silently, listening to her hut for a moment before moving. She rises from her bed without a groan of grunt, pulling on the light furs that her most active rangers wear. Sweating is bad in the cold, they’ learned that the hard way when some guards had bundled themselves too heavily and gotten hypothermia from their frozen sweat. Her footsteps are light even as she retrieves her weapons, strapping them securely about herself.

The snow is falling when she steps outside, and each flake that drifts to the ground feels like a dull finger pressing a bruise into her soul. She might have thought the snow was pretty, once, but she just associates it with those days when they’d first stopped here, when she had cried endlessly for the loss that could never be accounted for. The snow that builds up on her shoulders weighs her down beyond its mass, and she brushes it off before trudging on to the first leg of her patrol.

Octavia doesn’t realize she sets off the wrong way, however. When everything’s just one bland blur, why should she care? Someone does notice, however, and she picks up a tail as she leaves the fortified wall, a figure stalking through the snow with an almost predatory grace. Octavia just walks onwards, headed toward the edge of a cliff that will allow her to check a ravine. Her rangers would have passed this way a few hours ago, but Octavia checks anyway.

The figure falls behind as she marches onwards, and as such Octavia reaches the drop off alone. And it’s there, looking over an impossibly long fall, that the grey starts whispering to her. Ways to make herself feel again, things she can do to stop the numbness. It calls her forward, gently, so soft in its summons that Octavia doesn’t see the fresh powder she’s knocking over the edge with her toes. Not that she would care, anyway, she knows how this ends. She’d hoped for a death in battle, but if her life had taught her anything, it’s that death is never glorious. In the end, it’s just messy.

Her mind does catch up with her body eventually, breath hitching in her throat as her feet inch forward over empty air. Her heartbeat speeds up and she begins to see tones of brown in the rocks, shimmers of ivory in the snow drifts. But it’s not enough. She wants to see more, and she sure as hell can’t go back to before. And there, at the bottom of the ravine so very far below her, is a heart of translucent blue, shining like a beacon for her. Octavia always had loved blue.

And then Octavia is yanked back and lands on her left side in the snow, furious. She pushes herself up and unsheathes her sword, ready to kill the intruder who had damned her to life. She doesn’t stop to wonder why an enemy would want to save her.

“What the hell were you thinking?!” She definitely doesn’t expect an enemy to scold her, and she lowers her sword in confusion. She knows that voice, but she hasn’t heard it in a long time. There’s only one person that Octavia had avoided for long enough to forget, and of course that makes him stick out in her mind. She puts her sword back with an annoyed grunt.

“Leave me alone, Murphy.” She turns back towards the rest of her route. At this point she does realize that she’s set out the wrong way, but it won’t cause her any issues, She’ll just have to climb uphill on the way back, and the burning in her calves will serve as a good reminder to keep her head about her in the future. As she places her left foot forward, and hand grabs her arm.

“No, I’m not going to leave you alone. You were trying to kill yourself, Octavia!” She wonders where the hell he gets off, being all concerned about life. Surely he’s tried to kill her at least once? 

“Wasn’t.” It’s just a mutter, but snow has a way of dampening sound and amplifying voices.

“Yes, you were. We’ve all been worried about you, but we gave you your space. Clearly that was a fucking mistake.” His hand is still on her arm, and Octavia feels it like a brand. No one has touched her in any manner in months. She throws his hand off and spins to glare at him.

“What gives you the right to be worried about me? You’re a murderer, Murphy. You don’t give a shit about life.”

“Life changed, people change.” He narrows his eyes at her, and Octavia can pick every shade of blue out of them. Her heart is racing and she can practically taste life as it should be on her tongue. “You’ve changed. The Octavia I knew and hated wouldn’t have jumped off a cliff.”

“You don’t understand, Murphy! I didn’t want to die. I just..” She struggles to come up with words that sum it all up. Nothing ever could, she supposes. “I wanted to see things again.”

“You think I don’t understand?” He halves the distance between them and sweeps his arm in the direction of their village, offense clear in his tone. “You think we all don’t understand? There’s a reason we stay together, Octavia. There’s a reason Miller still tells stories of Monty hacking Mount Weather’s system, even though we’ve heard them a thousand times before.” 

“And what is that reason?” Octavia spits when he doesn’t continue, looking at her as if he’s waiting for her to connect the dots on her own. 

“Because we’re alive, Octavia. We’re the ones who made it, and it fucking hurts, but we don’t just throw that away!” And Octavia notices they’ve closed the distance between them, and the space between their bodies is filled with heat, not just the lack of cold she’s come to associate with the world. She doesn’t feel sorry for him, or for herself, or for the others who survived. 

But god, does she ever _feel_. There are colours that she’d never noticed painting the mountainside. There she is, faced with a person that she’d tolerated at the best of times and vilified at all others, and she finally feels a little bit of that rebellious girl again. The ones who’d chased butterflies, followed flower trails, and spilled the blood of hundreds of men.

“You know you’re the reason there’s so few of us?” She wants to hurt him, but Murphy just laughs.

“I don’t need you telling me that, I know it well enough. But I’m not going to let any more of us die.” She’d never seen Murphy as a physically imposing guy, but there’s something about the aura that he’s giving off that makes him seem to be the most solid wall in existence. Octavia cocks her head to the side and quirks an eyebrow.

“And how are you going to stop me?” He doesn’t respond, doesn’t rise to her bait. He just continues to glare at her, and Octavia fights a war within herself. She knows there are more healthy ways to deal with her emotions, better ways to feel alive like this. But right now she feels cocky and impulsive, and she grabs hold of it with both hands.

She presses her lips to Murphy’s and wraps gloved hands around the back of his neck. The contact burns her, awakening the volcano that had once been her lifeforce. Murphy hardly hesitates before responding, grabbing her hips and moving his lips against hers. She bites his bottom lip hard enough to taste blood, and Murphy just whispers a “Shit” against her mouth. She grinds against him, sensations dulled by the layers of fur, but still far too intense for her after being a walking corpse for so long.

Their embrace is more of a battle than anything affectionate. Octavia curses her gloves that blunt what would have been scratch marks as Murphy grabs her tight enough to bruise had they not been wearing full gear. Murphy bites at her neck and Octavia pulls at his hair, drawing a moan from him. Her world narrow to the bright red beading on his lips and the scorching blue of his eyes. She feels need growing within her, almost painful in its urgency, and she pushes him away.

They both stand a fair distance from each other, panting on cold air with their eyes locked. Octavia’s fingers probe what will surely be bruises and Murphy licks at his lips. He straightens fully first, and walks past Octavia.

“We usually eat in Bellamy’s cabin just after nightfall.” Octavia nods her head for no reason. He knows she’ll be joining them. There’s no way she can go back to her life before, not now that she’s awake. “And Octavia?”

She turns to look at where Murphy is standing, looking over his shoulder at her.

“You try to jump again and I’ll throw you off the damn mountain. You get one motivational speech from me, that’s it.”

“What about the other stuff? That a one time deal too?” Murphy just smiles and walks back to camp, and Octavia can’t help but smile in response.

It’s a twisted smile, prompted by the idea of pleasure and pain blended so fine that they can’t be distinguished. But Octavia guesses that everything’s twisted now, and therein lies the flaw in her view on life. She’d been trying to see the forest in the snow, when really she should have been enjoying the destructive beauty of the avalanche. They’d all come so far, and it was wrong of her to think that they all ought to be the same at the end of it. No matter how they’d changed, at least twenty of them were still alive.

**Author's Note:**

> So! I, uh, someone posted a sad video and this happened. You know, one of the then and now type ones? Yeah, it got me to thinking about what would happen when they weren't fighting anymore. And I've always sorta loved Murphtavia as a hateship, or as two badasses fucking shit up and fucking each other. Anyway! Thank to the good news bearing angel that is [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) for the speedy edit
> 
> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com)! As always, thanks for commenting/viewing/leaving kudos <3


End file.
